Homes and commercial buildings may experience damage or otherwise be negatively impacted due to fires, earthquakes, tornados, flooding, and other disasters. Such disasters may be of natural causes, or they may result from mechanical failure, human error, or any number of other non-natural causes. As an example, flooding may result from a wide variety of natural conditions, including excessive rain, storm surges, or rapid melting of snow or ice. Additionally, freezing temperatures may cause the water inside water pipes to freeze, expand and burst the pipes. Water hoses may be become disconnected or may become brittle and break. Sinks and commodes may overflow from clogged pipes. As another example, fire can result from natural causes, such as lightning strikes, or it can result from human-related causes, such as a gas leak resulting in gas buildup, ignition and “puff back”; a stove or oven that becomes excessively hot; an overloaded electrical circuit; or a curling iron left in close proximity to a flammable material. The cause of damage to property may come from any number of sources and the damage caused to the property typically varies greatly with each and every cause in any number of ways related to the scope and magnitude of the damage.
The damage caused by water, fire, hail or other disasters is rarely easy to identify, or even limited to the area where the mishap occurred. For example, hail may damage a roof in places which are difficult to view and/or access. As a second example, a pipe may suffer a break that is confined to a particular location, but broken pipes often lead to flooding, which may be widespread throughout an entire structure and the scope of such flooding may be impossible to determine during simple inspection. Likewise, even though a fire may be contained to a particular room or location in a building, it may cause smoke damage throughout the entire building or even adjacent buildings in places not easily accessible. Moreover, the building may suffer water damage and/or other types of damage as a result of efforts to extinguish the fire. Such damage may affect the structure of a property in ways that are impossible to determine without extensive testing or, in some cases, actual demolition of the property.
When a damaged structure is insured, the first step in disaster mitigation and restoration often involves notifying the insurance company of the damage or loss. The insurance company then typically dispatches a person, e.g. a vendor or adjuster, to physically and personally visit the damaged location to assess the loss and write an initial mitigation estimate that addresses the initial loss and any secondary damages. Alternatively, the insured party may call a vendor directly, personally provide a description of the damage to receive an initial mitigation estimate from the vendor, and then contact the insurance company.
Methods of inspecting property damage typically also require physical presence of an analyst on or near the damaged building. Such methods limit the analysis to buildings which the analyst or inspection company has obtained permission to inspect. In many cases, however, damage caused by nature, e.g. hail or high-winds, is widespread and far-reaching across city blocks, neighborhoods, towns and counties. For an insurance or inspection company to obtain permission to physically access each and every damaged property after a storm may require an exhausting, time-consuming and expensive process.
Also, an owner of a damaged property or an insurance company may need estimates from a number of repair companies in order to generate an estimate of damage to the property. Each repair company, in order to supply its own estimate or bid for cost of repairing the property may need its own analyst to physically visit the property. As such, one estimate to one damaged property may require a multitude of analysts from different repair companies each visiting and analyzing the property. In the case of widespread damage across even one neighborhood after a storm a proper analysis of the damage would require an enormously time-consuming and expensive process before an estimate can be generated. These expenses and time delays add up and add a great deal of economic waste with each individual property damaged.
Accuracy of damage estimates relies on accurate analysis. Analysis accuracy and techniques may also vary between analysts making it difficult and/or impossible to set industry-wide standards.
In today's world, due to a human not being efficient at looking at the entire roof for hail damage, most insurance adjusters take a representative sample to determine if there is hail damage for a directional slope on the roof. This is not always representative of the entire condition of a directional slope on the roof.